Our schedule of live and on-demand web programs, provide STG customers and Business Partners with a convenient way to stay up to date on new IBM products and programs. Bookmark this convenient schedule of upcoming and on demand events.

Oracle's recent announcement to stop further software development for the Itanium platform has created a significant anxiety amongst clients using Itanium technology. The webcast will discuss how enterprises can mitigate their risks and build a transition plan to a superior platform. Register for this important webcast to hear about future options for Itanium clients from IBM executives. This webcast will feature discussions on the impact, decision path, and major considerations that a user might encounter as they look ahead for answers.

Find out how Cloud Computing can make IT economics work for you in this informative webcast. Join Tony Iams, SVP &amp; Analyst, Ideas International, Inc and Annette Miller, Program Director Cloud Computing, IBM Systems & Technology Group, as they discuss the advantages of private cloud and the key requirements for effective cloud deployment. Hear from the experts about the requirements for successful deployment of private clouds. Click here to register.

Smarter Computing--IBM's technology point of view to help clients apply architectural principles to federated data, optimized systems, cloud and new delivery models to transform entire IT infrastructures to improve economics and support innovation is explained in this virtual event featuring Smarter Computing announcements and customer success stories. Register here to listen.

On-Demand: Taming x86 Server Sprawl

Many IT organizations, burdened with the costs and complexities of managing expanding x86 server farms, have realized the benefits of server and workload consolidation on IBM Power Systems. Watch this eye-opening webcast, on the advantages and benefits of x86 server consolidation on Power. Register here to listen.

IBM Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, was built by a team of IBM scientists who set out to accomplish a grand challenge -- build a computing system that rivals a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence. IBM Watson passed its first test on Jeopardy! In February 2011, but the real test will be in applying the underlying systems, data management and analytics technology in business and across different industries. Listen to this webcast to delve into the present and future business implications of the DeepQA technology behind Watson. Click here to register now!

Since IBM's creation, IBM Watson played on Jeopardy, we've been getting alot of questions about the future of this superstar. So, we thought the best way to answer some of the questions was to do a LIVE webcast and tell you all what Watson has been up to since he won Jeopardy. On March 22nd IBM is doing a LIVE Webcast with Watson's creators and Information Week Magazine. Click here to register to attend and get all the news on IBM Watson. Be sure to tune in to learn more about the elusive Watson. And no, he is not getting a Hollywood Agent.:) But , he will continue to run on the IBM Power7 server and beat all comers.

IBM Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, was built by a team of IBM scientists who set out to accomplish a grand challenge -- build a computing system that rivals a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence. IBM Watson passed its first test on Jeopardy! in February 2011, but the real test will be in applying the underlying systems, data management and analytics technology in business and across different industries.

Moderated by Stephen Baker, author of Final Jeopardy: Man vs Machine and the Quest to Know Everything, and featuring a panel of IBM business and research executives, this webcast will delve into the present and future business implications of the DeepQA technology behind Watson.

Pictured: IBM Watson in Action: Buzzing in with the right answer to take the lead

Some of you may have heard that on Wednesday night, the Supercomputer known as IBM Watson defeated the two biggest "Jeopardy" winners of all time: Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. IBM Watson finished the Jeopardy competition on Wednesday night with $77,147 in winnings over Jennings' $24,000 and Rutter's $21,600. Whether you turn on the TV, open the newspaper or log-on to Twitter, you'll find news of Watson's victory. Watson is sweeping the media with headlines shouting that in the battle of man versus machine, the machine won. Well, that's not quite true. Yes, Watson is a machine, but the Supercomputer is a machine created by humans. The brains behind Watson are the researchers and IBM technologists who developed this creation. Wednesday night at the special Jeopardy screening viewing at the Landmark Theatre in Los Angeles, I had the pleasure of meeting some of the brains behind Watson. Two brilliant IBM Researchers joined a full house of IBM customers at the event. Just as fascinating as watching IBM Watson play Jeopardy, was the live question and answer session that followed the Jeopardy TV show. Rick Lawrence, Manager, Machine Learning at IBM Research and Bhavani Iyer, Software Developer, IBM Research held the interest of the capacity crowd for almost an hour after the Jeopardy show ended. The human brains behind Watson shared the fascinating back story of how Watson was built and programmed for Jeopardy success.

According to Rick Lawrence, the power behind Watson is "2,800 IBM Power7 processor cores and 16 terabytes of working memory. " What does that look like? Well think of 10 big refrigerators all together in one room, and that gives you a vision of the servers behind IBM Watson. The IBM Watson Super Computer enjoys virtually 24 X 7 up time and lightening quick processing time via IBM's Power7 processors. This accounts for the speed with which Watson can "buzz in" to note he is ready to answer a question or search his data stores to find an obscure answer like who was inspired by William Wilkinson's "An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia" to create a famous novel? Elementary my dear Watson, Who was Bram Stoker and Watson got it right! While Watson knew his 19th century authors, there were other questions that he appeared not to know. There were a few of questions from the Los Angeles audience about some of Watson's answers during the Final Jeopardy part of the first game. In this Jeopardy match, Watson gave a notable wrong answer. The category was US cities, the Jeopardy clue was "Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle." The correct answer was "Chicago", but Watson answered "Toronto." One customer asked, "How did Watson get the wrong city on the airport and the World War II battle question?" Good question.

Rick explained that Watson has "learned" that correct answers within the US cities category are not always cities, so that the category did not provide sufficient confidence to select Chicago over Toronto. Indeed, Watson's confidence for both answers was well below 50 percent. Rick also noted that postmortem analysis by the Watson team has shown that had the words "US City" been in the clue, Watson would have given priority to Chicago. Another question from the Los Angeles audience was, "What about how Watson computes the amount of the odd wagers/bets he made?" While Watson has tremendous capability to search and retrieve data from all the encyclopedias, dictionaries and news articles stored in his data repository, the Super Computer had an interesting way of placing wagers that did not go unnoticed by the audience. When Ken and Brad made nicely rounded wagers, like $2,000 or $5,000, Watson was coming up with odd numbered wagers like $8,788. What accounted for Watson's odd wagers? According to the researchers, it was the mathematical calculations that Watson was running that allowed the Super Computer to come up with its precisely numbered bets. Rick discussed Watson's wagering strategy in some detail, noting the the relatively low wager that Watson placed during this Final Jeopardy round reflected Watson's historical performance in this category, as well as the fact that Watson had a significant lead at this point.

The evening concluded with Bhavani Iyer taking a few questions from the audience on the Question and Answer Technology Watson uses. Bhavani Iyer is responsible for achieving the speed in the DeepQA technology that makes the system competitive in a live Jeopardy match. One audience member asked,"How is Watson processing the Jeopardy questions? " Bhavani explained that Watson considers internal representation of analyzed content of about the equivalent of 200 million pages when attempting to answer a clue. Bhavani explained that Watson's DeepQA processing is both CPU and memory intensive. Initially, Watson's computation took 2 hours to answer a question on a single CPU. By scaling out Watson's computation over 2,880 POWER7 processing cores and optimizing the computation and access to its data, Watson is able to answer most questions in about 3 seconds enabling the system to compete on Jeopardy. This how Watson can search his machine brain, just like a human processes a question through the brain pathways looking for an answer. Another question for Bhavani " What was the underlying framework within Watson used to scale things?" "We used Apache UIMA," said Bhavani. "This is a technology developed in IBM and used as the framework for the processing. This is Opensource and can be downloaded from www.uima.apache.org"

Both Rick and Bhavani were amazed by the audience's enthusiastic response to Watson's Jeopardy win. "Watson sparks the audience's imagination and everyone is fascinated by Watson whether they are technical or not," Bhavani told me after the event. "This is because Waston changes the way humans interact with computers," says Bhavani. "No more searching by one keyword for an answer, now you can just ask a question." I have a feeling, Watson will be answering a lot more questions. Think of the possibilities for enhancing decision making in scenarios like health care. The possibilities are endless.